I got the impression from the question that he's talking about tech in general. In which case I can count myself. I work for $BIG_CORP as a software engineer and there's animosity here. On our side a lot of it stems from -
If our software does really, really well in the marketplace then we might get a reasonable payrise, whilst some of the guys on the business side get to retire from the profits, buy sports cars etc.
If our software does badly then there will be layoffs.
We tend to be ignored and dictated to, as if we're an inconvenience, not actually, you know, the guys that design and procude everything you goddamn sell.
We're smarter than them. In the geeky, pure-intellect, tough-maths-problem way. Many of them are overly loud, arrogant and annoying. Somehow they make more money and are always travelling places and have great cars though...
They're always telling us not to do fun techie stuff (otherwise known as innovation) in favour of endless interface tweaking and repackaging (otherwise known as making software actually usable).
From their side, we're probably moody, have over-inflated senses of entitlement and our own importance, get in the way of "corporate direction" whenever we can, mutter about unintelligible and unimportant stuff all the time, spend all our money on stupid gadgets, are usually passive-aggressive and are nearly always lazy.
Swings and roundabouts. Been the same way in every company I worked for.
Utterly trivial. The combination of something obvious (annotating pictures, been done since photography came around) and combining it with a little gui flip-trick. FUCKING WOW. I'M IMPRESSED.
There are some religious schools teaching this bullshit, yes. but in the main it is not a concern. It's really only the US where whole states have gone over to it.
"First of all absence of evidence is never evidence of absence, nor even "as good as" evidence of absence."
In terms of making accurate predictions about the nature of reality it is. If I find a god-of-the-gaps style gap, put all sorts of mythos into it, and then berate people to live their lives according to my dogma, going so far as to solicit changes in the law. If I also challenge well evidenced scientific theories based on my gap "theory". If I do these things and then argue "you can't disprove me", well you catch my drift.
Is it as good in gathering knowledge about the nature of the universe? Of course not. Does it allow us to dismiss the claims of whackos? Why yes it does.
"I don't think you can absolve those scientists who abandon the scientific method in favour of "pretty much as good as" any more than we should tolerate the religious types who dress up belief in pseudo-science in the hopes of deceiving their audience. "
I respectfully disagree, so long as they are not using it in their science. I also don't really think the term scientist is particularly appropriate here. Not everyone that understands scientific method and the nature of this debate is necessarily a scientist by trade, nor do they need to be. I'm noticing lay people elevating scientists to the level of revered authorities. I know some scientists. They're human like the rest of us, and usually drink more:)
"I'd be pissed to have to pay money to a religious institution that I wasn't a member of."
Oh I am, and the fact that there is public funding for other religious schools in this country, christian, muslim and others.
I don't like it one bit, and there is public debate on it. But I think the bad point of having a weakened state religion is that most people then assume all religion is just as weak, watery and broken, when some of it is outright pernicious. We now have a few schools that are at least partially state funded that do teach creationism/ID and a young earth. And who knows what the muslims are teaching their kids. Shouldn't be allowed! Or at least shouldn't be publicly funded.
The only thing "atheist" means is without religion, either because they assert there is no god (strong atheism, these people are generally a bit unhinged) or because they reject religion based on total lack of evidence (weak or agnostic atheism, most agnostics and people that call themselves atheists fall into this category).
That's an impressive straw man there though, that jump of yours from "no religion" to "all rules are negotiable". It's very very similar to that tired old line that atheists must necessarily be a/immoral because the hand of god isn't over them with the threat of a thunderbolt or hell or whatever.
"Now, suppose you want to start the software running with temporal variable set to 50% of the way through the fratal's sequence. Does that make the unviewed portion false in some way? "
No, it doesn't, but from the point of view of a thinking being in the continuum described by your fractal, where you've started it makes no difference at all. To all intent and purposes you are irrelevant. Unless you start messing with the terms.
"The trouble is that many scientists seem prone to the fallacy that absence of evidence implies evidence of absence."
No, the problem is that (the bad kind of) religious folks don't see that absence of evidence is pretty much as good evidence as absence when it comes to building a huge, precarious worldview and belief system, and then using that to make claims about objective reality. Usually in direct contradiction to things for which there is plenty of evidence. That's where conflict arises.
The right to take your kids out of school, or send them to a private school. Plus the right to vote the scum that put the policy in place out next time.
I guess in the US you *could* try taking the government to court over it. But that doesn't seem to have stopped some US states.
Frankly I think the state religion has done us a world of good - in the UK christianity is (almost) uniformly regarded as a weak, watery religion that exists mostly to make people feel virtuous without having to put in any effort. And support the tea and cake industries of course.
It's become so nondescript and permissive, and so associated with little old ladies selling jam and sponge-cake on a sunday afternoon,and english village society in general, that whenever the leader (Archbishop) dares voice a political opinion he tends to be told by the public and the press that he's irrelevant.
Because I've never taken a cd to a friend's place, used it in someone else's car (or a hire car), or given one away to a friend when I didn't want it any more.
Fuck that, I'll stick to the CD, which I can rip myself.
1. Current estimate for age of earth remains unchanged at around 4.5 billion years 2. It does very little to the theory of evolution. There are many other dating techniques and you'd have to do some SERIOUS damage to the dating scheme of the WHOLE of the fossil record before you could throw a spanner in the works of evolutionary theory, especially considering the very strong evidence we have in the form of DNA.
The Riddle of Epicuris Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
Free will be damned, starving children in their millions across the world are not given a chance to fall down because of free will. They die, starving, without a chance. Your god is malevolent or non existant. Pick one.
"Ah, I love a good debate. Notice I said "Cosmologically speaking"? Before that time there was no life;"
The pre-cambrian era lasted roughly 4 billion years. The cosmos is about 13.5 billion years old. The precambrian lasted somewhere around one third to one quarter of the life of the cosmos (so far).
"I'm no expert"
That much is clear.
"But that's not so: in this pre-cambrian era ALL phylum of life was created."
What do you mean by that? If you mean "that's when the ancestral forms of all life arose", then you are correct. If you think that suddenly creatures sprang fully formed from nowhere you are insane. Mammals didn't start to diverge from reptiles until tens of millions of years later.
"Which is why the trillobite, the oldest- or one-of-the-oldest creatures has a spine."
The trilobite was an invertebrate. No spine. Spines came later.
"Lots of little, 'short' journeys from what the animals were to what they are today, according to the fossil record."
FAIL.
"Now, I know your teachers don't want you to believe this, you see Christians as brainless fools, but if you find this many, no-way-they-could-have-guessed-it truths in the Bible and you don't make an honest attempt to follow the data there, aren't you being foolish?"
I left school along time ago. It was a christian school. My teachers didn't try to sell me on the crap you're spouting.
From reading the rest of your message it's obvious I've been trolled, epicly. Well done. On the off chance this isn't a troll I suggest you read a bit more about what actually happened and about the timescales involved.
this made me laugh -
"Why else would a religion that's based on acceptance, hating-the-sin-but-loving-the-sinner be something so reviled?"
yes, but if you dropped more than two people in, perhaps 6, or a dozen, with equal numbers of two skin tones, and you repeated the experiment a number of times, I'm betting you'd see folks split into skin-colour biased groups more often than not.
It's part of the biological "is like me" test that we have built in.
Is this a cause or justification for prejudice, separatism or disadvantage to particular groups? No, it is not, but AFAICT it's a biological fact we're going to have to learn to live with/work around.
No, much of it is a mix of legend, allegory and myth. The actual historical facts in there are few and far between, especially when compared to the number of baseless assertions and statements that could be interpreted in such a great number of ways that they are meaningless.
"A materialist has decided that those sorts of things just can't happen at all:"
Strawman. What materialists demand is evidence. Let's try it again -
"How do you know the miracles are fake?" "I don't, but that stuff is far fetched enough that I'm going to need proof" "But here's an eyewitness account..." "It's unreliable." "How do you know it's unreliable?" "It's thousands of years old, it's been translated and spun for political gain, and it's from an age in which we know most humans attributed a lot of things to deities that we now know are natural phenomena"
Sure, after a while people grow dismissive of miracles and the like. But that's because there are hundreds of examples of people claiming all sorts of things, most of which turn out to be either hoaxes or idiocy.
"I may have an *opinion* about it based on what I believe, but what do I know? Only God is omniscient. (that's what *I* believe, anyway.)"
That's up to you, but please recognise that there is not a shred of evidence for your belief, before trying to browbeat others with your "truths".
"I don't believe we, as a species, decended from monkeys or apes but I suspect (strongly) that we've adapted over time to the current form we have today."
I suspect you mean you don't believe we had a common ancestor.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you exclusively talking about tech support?
I got the impression from the question that he's talking about tech in general. In which case I can count myself. I work for $BIG_CORP as a software engineer and there's animosity here. On our side a lot of it stems from -
If our software does really, really well in the marketplace then we might get a reasonable payrise, whilst some of the guys on the business side get to retire from the profits, buy sports cars etc.
If our software does badly then there will be layoffs.
We tend to be ignored and dictated to, as if we're an inconvenience, not actually, you know, the guys that design and procude everything you goddamn sell.
We're smarter than them. In the geeky, pure-intellect, tough-maths-problem way. Many of them are overly loud, arrogant and annoying. Somehow they make more money and are always travelling places and have great cars though...
They're always telling us not to do fun techie stuff (otherwise known as innovation) in favour of endless interface tweaking and repackaging (otherwise known as making software actually usable).
From their side, we're probably moody, have over-inflated senses of entitlement and our own importance, get in the way of "corporate direction" whenever we can, mutter about unintelligible and unimportant stuff all the time, spend all our money on stupid gadgets, are usually passive-aggressive and are nearly always lazy.
Swings and roundabouts. Been the same way in every company I worked for.
There's a third -
This is bad because it's trivial.
Utterly trivial. The combination of something obvious (annotating pictures, been done since photography came around) and combining it with a little gui flip-trick. FUCKING WOW. I'M IMPRESSED.
This is just dumb.
doesn't mean it makes sense.
just because you can ask "why do we exist?" doesn't mean there has to be an answer. It's like asking "How wide is blue?"
There are some religious schools teaching this bullshit, yes. but in the main it is not a concern. It's really only the US where whole states have gone over to it.
"First of all absence of evidence is never evidence of absence, nor even "as good as" evidence of absence."
In terms of making accurate predictions about the nature of reality it is. If I find a god-of-the-gaps style gap, put all sorts of mythos into it, and then berate people to live their lives according to my dogma, going so far as to solicit changes in the law. If I also challenge well evidenced scientific theories based on my gap "theory". If I do these things and then argue "you can't disprove me", well you catch my drift.
Is it as good in gathering knowledge about the nature of the universe? Of course not. Does it allow us to dismiss the claims of whackos? Why yes it does.
"I don't think you can absolve those scientists who abandon the scientific method in favour of "pretty much as good as" any more than we should tolerate the religious types who dress up belief in pseudo-science in the hopes of deceiving their audience. "
I respectfully disagree, so long as they are not using it in their science. I also don't really think the term scientist is particularly appropriate here. Not everyone that understands scientific method and the nature of this debate is necessarily a scientist by trade, nor do they need to be. I'm noticing lay people elevating scientists to the level of revered authorities. I know some scientists. They're human like the rest of us, and usually drink more :)
"I'd be pissed to have to pay money to a religious institution that I wasn't a member of."
Oh I am, and the fact that there is public funding for other religious schools in this country, christian, muslim and others.
I don't like it one bit, and there is public debate on it. But I think the bad point of having a weakened state religion is that most people then assume all religion is just as weak, watery and broken, when some of it is outright pernicious. We now have a few schools that are at least partially state funded that do teach creationism/ID and a young earth. And who knows what the muslims are teaching their kids. Shouldn't be allowed! Or at least shouldn't be publicly funded.
What the hell are you on about?
The only thing "atheist" means is without religion, either because they assert there is no god (strong atheism, these people are generally a bit unhinged) or because they reject religion based on total lack of evidence (weak or agnostic atheism, most agnostics and people that call themselves atheists fall into this category).
That's an impressive straw man there though, that jump of yours from "no religion" to "all rules are negotiable". It's very very similar to that tired old line that atheists must necessarily be a/immoral because the hand of god isn't over them with the threat of a thunderbolt or hell or whatever.
"Now, suppose you want to start the software running with temporal variable set to 50% of the way through the fratal's sequence. Does that make the unviewed portion false in some way? "
No, it doesn't, but from the point of view of a thinking being in the continuum described by your fractal, where you've started it makes no difference at all. To all intent and purposes you are irrelevant. Unless you start messing with the terms.
"The trouble is that many scientists seem prone to the fallacy that absence of evidence implies evidence of absence."
No, the problem is that (the bad kind of) religious folks don't see that absence of evidence is pretty much as good evidence as absence when it comes to building a huge, precarious worldview and belief system, and then using that to make claims about objective reality. Usually in direct contradiction to things for which there is plenty of evidence. That's where conflict arises.
Same as anyone else -
The right to take your kids out of school, or send them to a private school. Plus the right to vote the scum that put the policy in place out next time.
I guess in the US you *could* try taking the government to court over it. But that doesn't seem to have stopped some US states.
Frankly I think the state religion has done us a world of good - in the UK christianity is (almost) uniformly regarded as a weak, watery religion that exists mostly to make people feel virtuous without having to put in any effort. And support the tea and cake industries of course.
It's become so nondescript and permissive, and so associated with little old ladies selling jam and sponge-cake on a sunday afternoon,and english village society in general, that whenever the leader (Archbishop) dares voice a political opinion he tends to be told by the public and the press that he's irrelevant.
it's great really.
"Like most of life's problems this one can be solved with bending."
Bender "Bending" Rodriguez.
Because I've never taken a cd to a friend's place, used it in someone else's car (or a hire car), or given one away to a friend when I didn't want it any more.
Fuck that, I'll stick to the CD, which I can rip myself.
Simple situation -
Kids are born into famine in various places in africa. They die. Not all famines are caused by war or human action. Drought has killed thousands.
That's not as a result of free will or human evil. That's natural killing right there.
Yes.
unfortunately, in humans, this feeling of embitterment is there even when one side of a debate is living in fucking fairy land.
1. Current estimate for age of earth remains unchanged at around 4.5 billion years
2. It does very little to the theory of evolution. There are many other dating techniques and you'd have to do some SERIOUS damage to the dating scheme of the WHOLE of the fossil record before you could throw a spanner in the works of evolutionary theory, especially considering the very strong evidence we have in the form of DNA.
The Riddle of Epicuris
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
Free will be damned, starving children in their millions across the world are not given a chance to fall down because of free will. They die, starving, without a chance. Your god is malevolent or non existant. Pick one.
You can argue what you like, but when combined with the fossil record and observed speciation, it paints a very well supported picture.
Unlike the alternative - "God did it".
Nonsense
brain researchers using imaging technology have shown that, like the body's muscles, most are continually active over a 24-hour period.
It's a tired myth used by peddlars of supernatural crap.
"Let's not forget how we only use about 5% to 10% of our brain, so, who knows what else we can do with the rest of it."
Utter nonsense. This is just an urban myth.
"Ok, start listing the evidence for macro-evolution then. "
Fossil record. All of it.
DNA.
Observed speciation.
read some of talkorigins.org
"I am a creationist but I also believe in micro-evolution which accounts for differentiation amongst members of the same species."
Macroevolution and microevolution are the same thing. Really, go read about it.
"It's been spotted as one of the oldest non-plant ever found."
No it hasn't.
"Notice it has a spine?"
Trilobites are invertebrate. No spine.
"That's a problem for the tree of life, no?"
Nope.
"Isn't the template that micro-orgs ran the plant for millenia then grew up into something more?"
Yup.
"I understand the intent of the tree...but it's wrong. Fossils don't lie, right?"
You seem to though. Any elementary checking of your assertions would ytell you how wrong you are.
Also, explaining what you mean rather than just saying "that's a problem for the tree of life" might set you aside from the other trolls.
"Ah, I love a good debate. Notice I said "Cosmologically speaking"? Before that time there was no life;"
The pre-cambrian era lasted roughly 4 billion years. The cosmos is about 13.5 billion years old. The precambrian lasted somewhere around one third to one quarter of the life of the cosmos (so far).
"I'm no expert"
That much is clear.
"But that's not so: in this pre-cambrian era ALL phylum of life was created."
What do you mean by that? If you mean "that's when the ancestral forms of all life arose", then you are correct. If you think that suddenly creatures sprang fully formed from nowhere you are insane. Mammals didn't start to diverge from reptiles until tens of millions of years later.
"Which is why the trillobite, the oldest- or one-of-the-oldest creatures has a spine."
The trilobite was an invertebrate. No spine. Spines came later.
"Lots of little, 'short' journeys from what the animals were to what they are today, according to the fossil record."
FAIL.
"Now, I know your teachers don't want you to believe this, you see Christians as brainless fools, but if you find this many, no-way-they-could-have-guessed-it truths in the Bible and you don't make an honest attempt to follow the data there, aren't you being foolish?"
I left school along time ago. It was a christian school. My teachers didn't try to sell me on the crap you're spouting.
From reading the rest of your message it's obvious I've been trolled, epicly. Well done. On the off chance this isn't a troll I suggest you read a bit more about what actually happened and about the timescales involved.
this made me laugh -
"Why else would a religion that's based on acceptance, hating-the-sin-but-loving-the-sinner be something so reviled?"
because it's the truth!!?!?!? OMG!! Of course!!
yes, but if you dropped more than two people in, perhaps 6, or a dozen, with equal numbers of two skin tones, and you repeated the experiment a number of times, I'm betting you'd see folks split into skin-colour biased groups more often than not.
It's part of the biological "is like me" test that we have built in.
Is this a cause or justification for prejudice, separatism or disadvantage to particular groups? No, it is not, but AFAICT it's a biological fact we're going to have to learn to live with/work around.
""IF"? Much of the Bible IS historical fact. "
No, much of it is a mix of legend, allegory and myth. The actual historical facts in there are few and far between, especially when compared to the number of baseless assertions and statements that could be interpreted in such a great number of ways that they are meaningless.
"A materialist has decided that those sorts of things just can't happen at all:"
Strawman. What materialists demand is evidence. Let's try it again -
"How do you know the miracles are fake?"
"I don't, but that stuff is far fetched enough that I'm going to need proof"
"But here's an eyewitness account..."
"It's unreliable."
"How do you know it's unreliable?"
"It's thousands of years old, it's been translated and spun for political gain, and it's from an age in which we know most humans attributed a lot of things to deities that we now know are natural phenomena"
Sure, after a while people grow dismissive of miracles and the like. But that's because there are hundreds of examples of people claiming all sorts of things, most of which turn out to be either hoaxes or idiocy.
"I may have an *opinion* about it based on what I believe, but what do I know? Only God is omniscient. (that's what *I* believe, anyway.)"
That's up to you, but please recognise that there is not a shred of evidence for your belief, before trying to browbeat others with your "truths".
"I don't believe we, as a species, decended from monkeys or apes but I suspect (strongly) that we've adapted over time to the current form we have today."
I suspect you mean you don't believe we had a common ancestor.
if that's the case, may I ask why?
There's a whole heap of evidence.